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Though we might be kings in our kingdom, we are all in bondage to something. Our bondages may include anger, fear, guilt, hatred of authority, an attraction to violence, or to material goods, words, sex, drugs, even ideologies. Or we may become hooked on being a protester no matter what the issue. All these are expressions of our egoism, our bondage to self.
Bondage may be of a type from which, try as we may, we are unable to break free. It is like being seated on a toboggan in the snow at the top of a hill. A little push and we start to slide. We are free, out of bondage. But when we want to stop there are no brakes or steering apparatus. And so, though wanting to stop, we are unable to do so, we are trapped in our bondage. This is the problem of the addict, those unfortunates enslaved by alcohol, tobacco, drugs, etc. But it also the problem of all humanity, for we all commence our lives plagued with the universal addiction of nominating ourselves as being the focal point of the kingdom of self.
Earl Jabay found release after many distressing failures in his ministry, failures that brought him to the point of wanting to resign as a chaplain and get into something more useful. His release came through association with recovering alcoholics from Alcoholics Anonymous. He had even written a paper against these people before he discovered that they were what he himself needed. On meeting them, he found they were new people. Their whole style of life was changed. They were quiet inside-- something they called serenity. They were also joyful. Best of all, they were free, free from their alcoholic prisons and a number of other prisons besides.
At first he felt anger and jealousy towards them. As an ordained minister with qualifications in psychiatry, he felt he had faithfully served God in seeking to serve those whom he felt should benefit from his expertise. The secret turned out to be that these alcoholics knew God in a way quite foreign to himself. They spoke of God as a higher power, a person who was alive, as one to whom they had chosen to give authority over their lives. They had resigned from the throne of self, and had granted God his kingship. Quite suddenly, Jabay realized his folly. He had plenty of religion and plenty of psychiatry, but he had no real God. Though not an alcoholic, he buried his pride and asked his newly found friends to help him through the twelve steps of their program, because he knew that he, too, had an addiction. These steps are:
1. Admission of their powerlessness over alcohol--that their lives had become unmanageable.
2. To believe that a power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.
3. To turn their will and their lives over to the care of God.
4. To make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves.
5. To admit to God, to themselves, and to another human the exact nature of their wrongs.
6. To be ready and willing to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. To humbly ask God to remove their shortcomings.
8. To make a list of all the persons they had harmed, and to be willing to make amends to them all.
9. To make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. To continue to take personal inventory, and when wrong to promptly admit it.
11. Through prayer and meditation to seek to improve their conscious contact with God as they understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for them, and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, to try to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all their affairs.
Jabay says that these steps work, not only with alcoholics, but with mixed-up ministers. God became real to him for the first time in his life, and so, ten years after his ordination, he vacated the throne and stumbled into the kingdom.
The basic problem with man, Jabay says, is not that he is an immature child but rather that he is an egocentric godplayer. Granted that we may feel the opposite--small, weak, and victimized--but we act like gods. We can prove this to ourselves by remembering how we have judged and punished others, or how we have tried to do the work of two, or how we have bucked authority. Man, in relation to God, tries to displace Him, compete with him,
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